The former basketball coach, responsible for making Pau Gasol debut in the absolute, and current Minister of Education of the Andalusian Government, dies at the age of 61. Both in the world of sports and politics, he showed signs of his dialoguing and conciliatory character
The world of sports and also that of politics mourn the death of Javier Imbroda, former national basketball coach and current Minister of Education of the Junta de Andalucía at the age of 61, victim of an aggressive prostate cancer, which he was diagnosed with five, in 2017, which he seemed to overcome until a few months ago, when he suffered a relapse that has finally ended his life.
Although his work in Andalusian Government since 2019 it served to leave in recent times signs of his bonhomie, of his dialoguing and conciliatory character, which he had already done on the courts, Javier Imbroda was always, and above all, a man of basketball, sports, an institution in Malaga, where he assumed the bench of Maristas in 1984 and ended up taking it under the name of Unibox to a subchampionship of the ACB with the remembered triple failed by Mike Ansley that was about to snatch the title from Barcelona.
Born in Melilla (January 8, 1961) but settled in Malaga from a young age, Javier Imbroda had a Doctorate in Educational Sciences from the UBA and a master’s degree in Senior Business Management from the San Telmo International Institute, but it was his long career in the basketball and his vocation to share his experience, which led him to take the leap into politics, first as head of the municipal sports company of the Malaga’s town hall and then with his move, in 2018, to the España Ciudadana platform attracted by Albert Rivera. From his position as a public figure, he created his Foundation, which serves a hundred children daily, with sport as a tool for inclusion and which he promoted without public subsidies.
In basketball he built a solid career in the ACB for 17 seasons, in which he also went through Caja San Fernando (he reached a Copa del Rey in 1999), Valladolid and Menorca and lived a more convulsive stage on the bench of a Madrid in crisis, in the 2002-2003 season, to replace Sergio Scariolo , which ended with his dismissal by not reaching the play-offs. His 605 appearances in the ACB make him the sixth coach with the most appearances after Aíto, Pedro Martínez, Manel Comas, Luis Casimiro and Salva Maldonado.
His short but intense stage in the Spanish basketball team, to which he arrived first as an assistant to Lolo Sáinz and then as a coach, had flashes of brilliance. He was responsible for make Pau Gasol debut in the Eurobasket in Turkey, where Spain hung the bronze against Germany with 31 points from Pau, who remembered it this Sunday. «He leaves us a great, a benchmark of our basketball. The coach who gave me the indelible opportunity to debut in the national team.” A year later, under his orders, Spain achieved its first victory against the USA at the World Cup in Indianapolis, which earned it a meritorious fifth place in the tournament.
Lithuania
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Imbroda was part of the Lithuanian national team as an assistant coach in the Barcelona Games 92, where he won the bronze medal in a team that was led by Arvidas Sabonis or Valdemaras Homicius, two players who had a home in Torremolinos, and with whom he had established a good relationship, to the point that they trained in the summer with their teams. “I managed to win a medal at home with another team and the strangest thing was parading with the Lithuanian team at the opening,” he once explained.
Last February, during the Copa del Rey dispute in Granada, the coach from Melilla received a basketball tribute from the ACB, which received the emotional affection of the stands when he walked out onto the center of the court. In January, the Malaga City Council distinguished him with a star for sporting merit.